1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method for controlling a recording medium player and tape decks and, more particularly, to a method for having a single recording medium player play a recording medium containing a plurality of collections of information (each collection constituting a piece of music) in order to record the reproduced sound onto at least two magnetic tapes that are run in parallel by at least two tape decks.
2. Description of the Related Art
A compact disc (CD) is, for example, used as a recording medium that contains a plurality of pieces of music. The CD is played by a recording medium playing device called a CD player. The CD player may be, for example, connected to two tape decks. As the CD is being played by the CD player, the two tape decks may operate in parallel to record the pieces of music reproduced therefrom onto two magnetic tapes, one being run on each deck.
In the set-up above, two magnetic tapes of the same length (for the same recording time) are usually loaded onto the two tape decks. However, there may be a case where two magnetic tapes have a different length each. In that case, what the operator of the equipment has conventionally done is as follows: When side A of the shorter magnetic tape comes to an end, the operator stops the recording operation on the longer magnetic tape after allowing the piece of music being last recorded thereon to fade out. The operator then gets the CD player to search for the beginning of that last piece of music on the CD. On the two tape decks, the operator changes the magnetic tapes from side A to side B. After the side change, the running of the CD player and the recording operation of the tape decks are both resumed so that the last recorded piece of music is again recorded from its beginning on side B of both tapes.
This means that on the longer magnetic tape, the remaining part of side A and the same length of the first portion of side B remain unrecorded. This waste of recording resources is obviously not desirable from the point of view of effective tape editing.